The use of mobile communications networks has increased over the last decade. Operators of the mobile communications networks have increased the number of base stations and/or base transceiver stations (BTS) in order to meet an increased demand for service by users of the mobile communications networks. The operators of the mobile communications networks wish to reduce the costs associated with installing and operating the base stations. This wish for cost reduction has led network operators and manufacturers of network infrastructure to come up with new concepts for the network architecture. One of these architectures is known as “BTS Hoteling”. In the BTS Hoteling approach, the remote radio head is moved further from the remainder of the BTS, to enable the remainder of the BTS to be co-located with similar parts of other BTSs (for an entire city, for example) to form a BTS hotel. The BTS Hoteling approach involves all of the baseband/control/transport parts of a number of base stations being housed at the same location (e.g. for ease of maintenance and to save housing costs). The BTS hotel and the remote radio head(s) are connected by means of dedicated fibre-optic or microwave point-to-point links, for example, from the BTS baseband sections to their respective remote radio heads.
In current mobile network architectures, there is typically a 1-to-1 relationship between BTS baseband hardware deployments and radio frequency (RF) hardware deployments. In other words, if a particular BTS has a maximum capability of supporting a number of X users (or the data equivalent) on Y carriers, then both the RF and baseband hardware elements are capable of fully supporting this number of users, at each and every site in the network employing that particular BTS design. In other words, each BTS site should be dimensioned for the amount of communication traffic during peak hours. A large portion of the traffic handling capacity of different ones of the BTS sites is not utilised during off-peak hours. The hours that constitute ‘peak’ hours will vary from site to site; for example, a city centre site may experience its peak hours during the working day, whereas a suburban site may experience its peak hours during the morning and evening commuting times.